Barbie opens with a parody of The Dawn of Man, the wordless opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. On Saturday, you can see the real thing at the Time Warp Drive-In’s July edition, A Real Horrorshow: The Dark Visions of Stanley Kubrick. It’s a redo of one of the most popular programs in the Time Warp’s ten-year history. Here’s the fabled “3 Million Year cut” that Greta Gerwig appropriated with a wink.
The auteurist evening begins with The Shining, another of Kubrick’s films that has been endlessly parodied since its release in 1980. People have been trying to approach the sheer creepy power of this scene for the last 40 years, and no one has got it right yet.
Both The Shining and the third film of the evening, A Clockwork Orange, have been featured on my Never Seen It series — which I swear I’m going to get back to soon! The 1971 film is a pioneering work of dystopian sci fi, and features one of the greatest opening shots of all time.
On Thursday, August 3rd, Crosstown Theater’s film series presents Five Easy Pieces. The film by director Bob Rafelson cemented Jack Nicholson’s reputation as the best actor of his generation.
Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales.
Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.
The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?
The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.
Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.
On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.
On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.
Perpetually controversial and long thought unfilmable, Judy Blume’s 1970 novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. finally gets a big screen adaptation courtesy of writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig. Margaret (Ant-Man‘s Abby Ryder Fortson) is the daughter of an interfaith marriage who rejects both of her parents’ religions while negotiating impending puberty. Rachel McAdams plays Margaret’s mother Barbara, and Memphian Kathy Bates co-stars as Margaret’s conservative Christian grandmother.
London-based screenwriter Nida Manzoor makes her directorial debut with Polite Society. Ria (Bridgerton‘s Priya Kansara) is an aspiring stunt performer whose sister Lena (Umbrella Academy‘s Ritu Arya) is about to get married. But fiancée Salim (Akshaye Khanna) has a family secret, and it ain’t pretty. This one’s giving off strong droll-British-comedy vibes, and I’m here for it.
The full title of our next one says it all, really. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World. Khris Davis from Judas and the Black Messiah stars as the beloved fighter and grilling enthusiast.
It’s the 10th anniversary of the Time Warp Drive-In, the classic movie collaboration between Black Lodge, filmmaker Mike McCarthy, and Malco Theater’s Summer Drive-In. To celebrate, they’re bringing back of their most popular programs. This month, it’s Quintessential Quintin: The Early Films of the Tarantino Universe. That means the wound-up neo-noir Reservoir Dogs, the Tarantino-penned Tony Scott classic True Romance, and, of course, the 1994 Palme D’Or winner, Pulp Fiction. Check out the original trailer, which looks just as radical today as it did back then. The films roll at sundown (7:45 p.m.) at the drive-in.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of two completely different films. The first is British music video director Adrian Lyne’s feature film breakthrough Flashdance. Jennifer Beals manages to be convincing as a welder in a steel mill who dreams of becoming a dancer. She’s moonlighting as a cabaret dancer when she meets a cute guy named Nick (Michael Nouri) who also happens to be her boss. It was a huge hit in 1983, but many more people saw the music videos that it spawned than sat through it in a theater. Flashdance will screen at the Malco Paradiso on Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m.
Flashdance‘s competition that weekend was a little movie called Return of the Jedi. George Lucas’ original title was Revenge of the Jedi, before someone pointed out that seeking revenge was more of a Sith thing.
The new name was better suited to a film whose hero finally wins by negating the premise and refusing to fight any more Star Wars.
Viola Davis stars as General Nanisca, a real-life African warrior from the 1820s, in The Woman King.
August is traditionally a slow month at the cinema as the summer tentpole season plays out. But this August, we’re also seeing the downstream effects of the pandemic production bottleneck. The surprising upshot is that the dearth of megabudget projects has created openings for a wide variety of new films to hit theaters, many of which are well worth your time.
The biggest release this weekend is The Woman King. Viola Davis is the only Black woman to have achieved the “Triple Crown of Acting” — winning an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony. She’s one of the elite group of actors who have an entire Wikipedia page devoted to listing her awards. Now, at age 57, she finally gets the big action role that all movie stars get these days. Davis stars as General Nanisca, the leader of the Agoji, an all-female group of warriors who defended the West African kingdom of Dahomey. Think The 300, but with Black women.
The surprise success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out spawned a mini-wave of cheeky murder mysteries. The latest is See How They Run. Yes, we’ve gathered you all together because one of you is a murderer. Maybe more than one. We’re not sure. It’s complicated. This one is set in the 1950s, when a hit play in London is being adapted for a Hollywood movie by director Leo Kapernick (Adrian Brody). When the director turns up dead, Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and rookie Constable Stalker (Saorise Ronan) are assigned to crack the case. The suspects are an all-star cast of pretentious theater people including Ruth Wilson and David Oyelowo. Watch Ronan’s hilarious deadpan in this fun trailer.
Ti West’s X was another surprise hit last spring. Now, the director and his star Mia Goth return with a prequel to that juicy bit of neo-exploitation cinema. Pearl tells the origin story of the elderly killer in X by flashing back to the silent era, where the titular Texan only wants to get out of the sticks and get famous. Early reviews have generated Oscar buzz for Goth, who, as you can see, is absolutely killing it.
It’s Time Warp Drive-In weekend, and if you’re a horror fan, this one is a can’t-miss. Sam Raimi scored the year’s second-biggest box office hit with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. You can see how he got his start with 1981’s The Evil Dead. Now considered a masterpiece of horror, The Evil Dead was shot on a shoestring budget in East Tennessee, and gained a big enough cult following to greenlight a sequel. Evil Dead 2 returned star Bruce Campbell to the Rocky Top hills, this time with more money and more know-how. Just look at this incredible scene, a masterclass in both practical effects and walking the thin line between horror and comedy.
The evening at the Malco Summer Drive-In will conclude with the third Evil Dead film, 1992s Army of Darkness, in which our not-too-bright hero Ash is transported back in time to save a medieval kingdom from the Deadites. Listen up you primitive screwheads! This is how it’s done!
Well, it’s officially Christmas movie season. If you’re beyond binging the Hallmark channel and have It’s a Wonderful Life committed to memory, Saturday’s Time Warp Drive-In has something for you. It’s the annual Strange Christmas program, and this year does not disappoint.
The first film is a stone-cold classic of horror comedy that has left generations of uptight parents and pearl-clutchers muttering “I’m not so sure this is appropriate …” Gremlins was the brainchild of director Joe Dante and writer Chris Columbus (who would go on to direct the first two Harry Potter movies.) It stars Zach Galligan as Billy, a young man trying to carve out an independent life for himself, who gets a strange gift from his father, an aspiring inventor named Randall, memorably played by country singer Hoyt Axton. It’s a new pet mogwai, unlike anything Billy has seen before. The mogwai in question, named Gizmo, comes with a few rules, which are promptly broken, to catastrophic results.
The character of Santa Claus is an amalgamation between the real life St. Nicholas, a Turkish bishop from the third century CE who is the patron saint of, among other things, thieves and prostitutes, and the Dutch Sinterklaas, along with a generous helping of revisions by American writer Thomas Nast and the Coca-Cola company. But what if he was actually a murderously evil supernatural force that has been barely contained for thousands of years? That’s the premise of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale.
I’ll have to admit, I had to look this one up. I’d never heard of the 2010 Finnish horror film before, but it looks absolutely bonkers. Grave robbing? Check. Yuletide kidnapping and extortion? Check. Explosions? You better believe there are explosions.
For the third film, something a little more traditional …
Oh, who am I kidding? It’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It’s a film that, as they say, does what’s on the tin. When Santa decides to outsource some elf work to the Red Planet, things go awry, and he’s forced to use force against the evil green rulers of Barsoom. How did this thing get made? On the one hand, it’s a transparently ridiculous pitch. Santa doesn’t “conquer” things. He gives gifts to good girls and boys. On the other hand, it’s a great pitch, because bam — instant name recognition, and no copyright issues, at least until the Martians get here and sue you for defamation. Either way, the pitch resonated with someone with too much disposable income, and now we have this timeless non-classic. You might have heard of this 1964 film because it was the basis for a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode. But at the Time Warp Drive-In, it’s presented in all its non-glory, and you’re free to do the riffing yourself.
The Time Warp Drive-In: Strange Christmas starts at 7 p.m. on Saturday, December 4th, at the Malco Summer Drive-In. Three movies for $25 per car, so find someone with a van and pack ’em in.
Every year, the Time Warp Drive-In series dedicates one of its monthly programs to celebrate psychedelia in all its forms. Gotta hand it to ’em, they know their audience.
This Saturday night at the Malco Summer Drive-In is the Best of the Burn — audience favorites from the previous years’ burn nights. First up is the Richard Linklater classic that made master monologist (and possible Texas gubernatorial candidate) Matthew McConaughey a household name. Dazed and Confused is the ultimate hangout movie. Think American Graffiti, if everyone was stoned the whole time. Here’s a clip where you can hear one of McConaughey’s now-timeless line readings: “It’d be a lot cooler if you did.”
The second film of the evening is one of the great literary adaptations of all time. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about a journalist blowing an assignment to cover a motorcycle race. So relatable. Misunderstood cinematic genius Terry Gilliam was perhaps the only person capable of bringing this one to life. In this clip, Thompson’s literary doppleganger Raoul Duke, played by not-yet-superstar Johnny Depp, tries to check into a hotel with the help of his attorney, a not-yet-superstar Benicio del Toro. “Ignore this terrible drug.”
The third film of the evening has been called the genesis of the stoner movie genre. Who but OG counterculture comedians Cheech and Chong could have made Up In Smoke? Here’s how the movie was sold in 1978. They don’t make trailers like this any more.
And finally, the granddaddy of them all, Reefer Madness. Rarely has any film, or any work of art at all, had its meaning so thoroughly reversed as Tell Your Children, the film produced by a church group to keep kids off the devil’s cabbage. Instead, it was bought by an exploitation producer Dwain Esper, who changed the title to Reefer Madness. Check out this warning of what will happen if you touch “the weed with its roots in Hell!” The intended audience’s reaction was “Don’t threaten me with a good time!”
The Time Warp Drive-In starts at dusk on Saturday at the Malco Summer Drive-In.
The band at last Saturday’s Time Warp Drive-In certainly lived up to its name. Seemingly out of nowhere, they simply became. Where at first only scattered musical gear was strewn in front of the concession stand at the Malco Summer Quartet, suddenly a band manifested itself. True, one of their songs mentions “beaming me up and beaming me down,” and with that clue alone, this reporter was intrigued. How exactly did they become?
I donned my sleuth’s hat, but all my years of investigative music journalism were of no avail. The band, shrouded in mystery, simply materialized at the golden hour, played a short, tight set, and were gone, leaving the gathered Earthlings only to wonder at what just happened.
Their SoundCloud page reveals precious little, its profile explaining only that the band consists of 7-year-old Seba, 12-year-old Holland, and 10-year-old G3. These reported ages were the first clue that something didn’t add up, that something unearthly was at work in this musical ensemble. For their playing was not a mere children’s curiosity, a slapdash, charming exercise in naivete. Rather, this was the sound of advanced beings well-versed in the niceties of rocking out.
The Becomers play before a screening of E.T. Note fuzzy faux alien in milk crate. (Photo by Alex Greene)
Deciding their deceptively juvenile ages were the result of traveling at near-light speeds before returning to Earth, I simply took in the power of their performance. There was a quick introductory song by the duet Breeze, featuring G3 on drums and friend Noah on bass. Then, as Holland sang and wielded her Gibson SG with aplomb, Seba’s bass and G3’s drums locked in like a locomotive and they were off, delivering a fine rendition of Nena’s “99 Red Balloons,” aka “99 Luftballoons.”
That set the tone for a short, sharp mix of covers and originals that mined a similar vein of power pop marked with an ’80s edge. Even “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin’s dinosaur rock chestnut, took on new meanings when played by a trio of bass, drums, and distorted ukulele, and delivered by instrument-swapping singers with a combined age of 29.
The real gems of the evening were the group’s originals. Their “Get Get Get It Going” is a fine mod anthem on par with the spiky punch of early works by The Who or The Creation, with just a touch of the Kink’s “Come On Now.”
Another uptempo number, “Energy,” had the audience singing along with gusto. And what an audience it was: When Time Warp co-curator Mike McCarthy seemed to half-jokingly imply that this was the best crowd turnout for any pre-movie warm-up band at the monthly event, I turned around to see that he was not joking at all. A crowd of dozens was gathered around the band area, cheering them on.
Among the crowd, and offering the occasional assist to G3, was another being, G2, who looked suspiciously like Graham Burks, better known for his role in local bands like Pezz, Sweet Knives, and Loose Opinions.
One original song The Becomers played, also available online, “Satellites Are Spinning Around the Earth,” was a perfect set-up for the evening’s first film, 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg. That song, of course, featured lyrics about beaming this way and that, in the manner of space-faring, sentient beings who can simply become at will. We can only hope that more frequent visitations on other local stages will “become a thing.”
*Full disclosure: G3 may or not be Graham Burks III, a piano student of the author’s.
The weather in Memphis couldn’t be more perfect, and Saturday night at the Malco Summer Drive-In you can spend a night under the stars with some summer movie season classics. Black Lodge’s Time Warp Drive-In celebrates May with Suburban Dreams: The ’80s Kids Adventure Films.
First on the list is the greatest of the bunch, and a perfect film. After Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind became an unexpectedly huge hit in 1977, he envisioned a sequel under the working title Watch the Skies. Based on an infamous UFO sighting from Kentucky, in which a Hopkinsville family claimed their farm was terrorized by aliens, the project got as far as a screenplay by Brother From Another Planet director John Sayles before Spielberg ditched the overt horror elements. Screenwriter Melissa Matheson came up with the line “E.T. phone home,” which became the jumping-off point for a new story of an alien who is accidentally left behind by a UFO. He (they?) are discovered hiding in a backyard shed by Elliott (Henry Thomas), a 10-year-old suburban kid whose family is in the midst of a painful divorce. With his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore, in a star-making role) Elliott tries to evade government scientists led by Peter Coyote (known only as “Keys”) and help E.T. rendezvous with a rescue ship.
E.T. is Spielberg at his most manipulative, and I mean that as a compliment. It is, strangely enough, an autobiographical story: E.T. was inspired by Spielberg’s imaginary friend who helped him get through his own parent’s divorce. Released in 1982, it held the title of highest-grossing film in history for eight years until another Spielberg film, Jurassic Park, displaced it at the top. It was also the first film as a producer for Kathleen Kennedy, the current head of Lucasfilm. In hindsight, what’s most remarkable about the story is its commitment to staying entirely within the secret world of kids, as you can see from this clip featuring a hopelessly endearing performance by a 7-year-old Drew Barrymore.
The logo of Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment comes from E.T. and Elliott’s famous nighttime bicycle flight. The second film of the night is another Amblin production, this one from 1985. The Goonies started life as a story Spielberg came up with, then passed on to director Richard Donner, pioneering director of the 1978 Superman. A group of misfit kids from the poor neighborhood of Astoria, Oregon, find a map to pirate treasure and race through an escalating series of Indiana Jones-inspired situations to save their families from eviction. Starring the future Samwise Gamgee Sean Austin and Josh Brolin in early roles, The Goonies is an irreverent, hyperactive adventure that has attracted a cult following over the years. Austin would later go on to star in the Goonies-inspired Netflix series Stranger Things.
The third and final film of the evening came out the same year as The Goonies. Proof of E.T.‘s long shadow, the story of Joe Dante’s Explorers is kind of the reverse of its inspiration. Instead of an alien coming down to Earth and secretly befriending kids, it’s a group of kids building a spaceship and flying up to meet the aliens. The best part of the film is the cast: It’s the debut film for both Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix, who are both terrific.
The Time Warp Drive-In films start at dusk, around 7:45 p.m. They will be preceded by a performance by The Becomers, a band whose members range in age from 7 to 12 years old. Admission is $25 per car, so bring the family for a night of impeccable entertainment.
Janet Leigh as Marion in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
April’s Time Warp Drive-In presents the films of the greatest suspense director of all time: Alfred Hitchcock.
The term”auteur” was literally coined to describe Hitch. Francois Truffaut, film critic turned director, identified Hitchcock and Howard Hawks as two individuals who were able to put their distinctive stamp on the films they made. They were “authors” (auteurs) of the films rather than just “stagers” (metteur en scene) of the story. By 1962, when Truffaut interviewed Hitchcock, there was plenty of films for the two to analyze. Hitchcock had his first hit film in 1927, and later directed the first British picture with sound.
Psycho, which debuted in 1960, would become his most notorious film. Hitch made his bones with murder mysteries, but Psycho is something different — the moment “thriller” tipped over into “horror.” Sometimes called the beginning of the slasher genre, its unconventional structure and stark imagery set it apart from everything in theaters at the time.
And then there’s the famous shower scene. Psycho was shot very quickly. By this time, Hitch was churning out thrillers for his TV show at an industrial scale, so he knew what he was doing. But the shower scene took a week. The result is probably the most-studied 4 minutes of film ever produced.
Next on the Time Warp menu is Vertigo. Considered a flop upon its 1958 release, the film finally overtook Citizen Kane in the #1 spot of the decadal Sight + Sound poll of film critics in 2012. Personally, I disagree. Vertigo isn’t even the best film Hitchcock ever did — that would be Rear Window. But there’s no doubt this story of obsession starring Jimmy Stewart as a police detective haunted by fear and failure, and Kim Novak as a mysterious woman who may or may not be a ghost, is a masterpiece. It shows Hitch at his most experimental, including the invention of the dolly zoom, and this dream sequence designed by abstract expressionist painter John Ferren.
The third film of the evening is Dial M for Murder. Originally shot in 3D, but rarely seen in stereoscopic vision because of the janky, proprietary process used in the early 50s, Dial M for Murder’s biggest attraction is Grace Kelly, who stars as a woman unaware she’s about to be offed by her husband, Ray Milland, and who later ends up framed for what was intended to be her own murder. This one’s got more twists and turns than five M. Night Shyamalan movies.
Time Warp Drive-In, presented by Black Lodge and Malco Theaters, starts at sundown on Saturday, April 10 at the Summer Drive-In.
It’s that time of year again. While everyone is trying to get in the holiday spirit, the Time Warp Drive-In offers spirits of a different kind. Every December, the retro cinema experience from Black Lodge, Mike McCarthy, Piano Man Pictures, and Holtermonster Designs brings the most bizzare Christmas films they can find to the Malco Summer Drive-In. The seventh edition of Strange Christmas features a doubleheader of holiday horror.
The first film is an unlikely classic. 1974’s Black Christmas is an early entry in the post-Exorcist horror boom. The cast is certainly impressive: It stars 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Keir Dullea, Enter the Dragon‘s John Saxon (who would later make a career out of playing cops in horror flicks), and future Lois Lane Margot Kidder. It was directed by Bob Clark, a former semi-pro football player turned ’70s low-budget auteur. Clark’s unlikely career included both the seminal teensploitation Porky’s and the beloved holiday comedy A Christmas Story. Black Christmas was Clark’s second film, and is now widely recognized by horror aficionados as a foundational slasher flick. It certainly decks the halls with the slasher trappings: A group of teenagers, mostly women (in this case, a sorority house), a remorseless killer whose motives are unclear to the victims, and a devilish creativity in murder techniques. You know how plastic bags are sometimes printed with suffocation warnings? Yeah, that.
Simply Having A Bloody Christmas Time Warp Drive-In
Black Christmas left a long legacy. John Carpenter cited it as an inspiration for Halloween, and it’s been remade twice, most recently last year as a feminist parable by indie director Sophia Takal. One of its most infamous descendants is the second film on the Strange Christmas bill, Silent Night, Deadly Night. Released in 1984 at the height of the Reagan-era slasher fad, Silent Night, Deadly Night was released the same day as A Nightmare on Elm Street. The film’s graphic TV commercials sparked such outrage that it was picketed by the PTA and pulled from release after only six days — but not before it made $2.5 million dollars. It seems the world wasn’t ready for a killer dressed as Santa Claus.
Simply Having A Bloody Christmas Time Warp Drive-In (2)
Tickets to the Time Warp Drive-In Strange Christmas Double Feature are $10, and masks are required for visits to the concession stand and bathrooms. Gates open at 6 p.m., show starts at 7 p.m.
